Exclusive poll: Women lock in on 2020
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::sighs:: Donnie showed once again he doesn’t understand elections. He posted this to boast about the far right column, but this is a primary, and the GOP has rigged the GOP primaries for him.
This isn’t even a presidential primary. It looks like it’s for Texas-13. 
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Yeah, I don’t understand why he inserted himself into a congressional primary!
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OMG. How is he polling in the hotly contested Hooterville dogcatcher race?
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Kamala Harris Is Said to Be Weighing an Endorsement of Joe Biden
So much news…
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Bernie taking a bigger lead in the primary polls. I’d vote for Bernie in the general election. While I dislike the bernie stans online, they would be an incredible asset in the general election. Bernie bro’s vs MAGA bro’a, think about it…
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True that.
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I’d be more interested in how Joni Earnst Is doing in Iowa because her Senate seat is up for re-election in 2020. 
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Yes, she’s got that seat to defend. Just reading quickly where she may be in the race…I could only gleen that she is writing a memoir coming out in May, 2020 which candidates always do to bolster their claims.
And she’s being attached to a ‘dark money’ PAC which she and her aides are benefiting from…and while legal, to have these adjacent funds, it violates the spirit of campaign contributions and direct solicitations.
WASHINGTON — An outside group founded by top political aides to Sen. Joni Ernst has worked closely with the Iowa Republican to raise money and boost her reelection prospects, a degree of overlap that potentially violates the law, documents obtained by the Associated Press show.
Iowa Values, a political nonprofit that is supposed to be run independently, was co-founded in 2017 by Ernst’s longtime consultant, Jon Kohan. It shares a fundraiser, Claire Holloway Avella, with the Ernst campaign. And a condo owned by a former aide — who was recently hired to lead the group — was used as Iowa Values’ address at a time when he worked for her.
Political nonprofits are often referred to as “dark money” groups because they can raise unlimited sums and are not required to reveal their donors. But they must take steps to keep their activities separate from the candidates they support. Additionally, while such tax-exempt groups can do political work, they can’t make it their primary purpose.
The documents reviewed by the AP, including emails and a strategy memo, not only make clear that the group’s aim is securing an Ernst win in 2020, but they also show Ernst and her campaign worked in close concert with Iowa Values.
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Campaign finance law states that candidates and their “agents” can’t solicit, direct or spend contributions that exceed federal limits, even if the donations are made to an outside group. Those limits currently prevent donors from giving more than $2,800 to a candidate and $5,000 to a political action committee per election.
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In July, Holloway Avella requested “an investment of $50,000” from a donor after Ernst made an introduction. She made clear in an email, which was obtained by the AP, how much a contribution of that size could help.
“As a follow up to our introduction by Senator Ernst, I am reaching out to you on behalf of Iowa Values,” she wrote.
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The recent surge in Sen Sanders popularity in the Primaries and his lead in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire has members of the Democratic Party uneasy. You wonder how his lead will affect the more centrist voters in the country, and a potential revisiting of the 2016 DNC’s manipulating the candidates positioning, with Bernie clearly losing out.
It does indicate a huge schism within the Democratic party…nothing new. But anticipate a lot of bracing for impact with this swing towards Sanders populism.
In the field of political forecasting, almost nothing is a matter of certainty, and almost everything is a matter of probability. If Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders — who currently leads the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, and appears to be consolidating support among the party’s progressive wing, while its moderates remain splintered — his prospects against Donald Trump in November would be far from hopeless. Polarization has given any major party nominee a high enough floor of support that the term “unelectable” has no real place in the discussion. What’s more, every candidate in the race brings a suite of their own liabilities Trump could exploit.
That said, the totality of the evidence suggests Sanders is an extremely, perhaps uniquely, risky nominee. His vulnerabilities are enormous and untested. No party nomination, with the possible exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964, has put forth a presidential nominee with the level of downside risk exposure as a Sanders-led ticket would bring. To nominate Sanders would be insane.
Sanders has gleefully discarded the party’s conventional wisdom that it has to pick and choose where to push public opinion leftward, adopting a comprehensive left-wing agenda, some of which is popular, and some of which is decidedly not. Positions in the latter category include replacing all private health insurance with a government plan, banning fracking, letting prisoners vote, decriminalizing the border, giving free health care to undocumented immigrants, and eliminating ICE. (I am only listing Sanders positions that are intensely unpopular. I am not including positions, like national rent control and phasing out all nuclear energy, that I consider ill-advised but which probably won’t harm him much with voters.)
Not every one of these unpopular stances is unique to Sanders. Some have won the endorsement of rival candidates, and many of them have been endorsed by Elizabeth Warren, Sanders’s closest rival. In fact, Sanders seem to have overtaken Warren in part because she spent most of 2019 closing the ideological gap between the two candidates, which made Democratic Party elites justifiably skeptical about her electability, thereby kneecapping her viability as a trans-factional candidate. Sanders probably wasn’t trying to undermine Warren by luring her into adopting all his policies, but it has worked out quite well for him, and poorly for her.
But Warren at least tries to couch her positions in a framework of reforming and revitalizing capitalism that is intended to reassure ideologically skeptical voters. Sanders combines unpopular program specifics in the unpopular packaging of “socialism.” The socialist label has grown less unpopular, a trend that has attracted so much media attention that many people have gotten the impression “socialism” is actually popular, which is absolutely not the case.
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This
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Brutal ad against Sen Martha McSally (r-az) for her election in Nov.
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Sen Ernst (R-IA) is being sent a message from Editorial Board from The Des Moines Register. She got burned…
Some Iowans watching her daily commentaries to reporters as Trump’s impeachment trial unfolds may question her allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and the integrity of the U.S. Senate.
Ernst and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa should step up and publicly support hearing from witnesses. They should vote “yes” if the Senate takes up the question of whether to issue subpoenas — and insist that any issued subpoenas are enforced.
All senators took an oath to “do impartial justice” in the impeachment trial. But it appears that Ernst already has her mind made up.
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She might want to contemplate whether the process, and her comments, will influence Iowa voters when they go to the polls in November to decide whether she deserves a second term.
Then there was her response in mid-January after the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office determined the White House violated the law when it withheld nearly $400 million in assistance to Ukraine — an issue at the heart of impeachment proceedings.
Ernst dismissed the GAO findings as “moot”because the White House did eventually provide the aid to Ukraine.
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I remember Republicans accusing Democrats of "handing out free stuff” like healthcare & food stamps to get votes for decades.
Now Trump allies are literally holding events in black communities, often falsely booked at venues and thinly veiled as charity events, where organizers lavish praise on Trump while handing out tens of thousands of dollars in cash to buy votes.
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This is relevant given Twitter is one of the big disinfo platforms.
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Donnie whined about Mike Bloomberg’s Superbowl ads today, but there’s a Trump hypocrisy for everything:
Taxpayers Get $3.4 Million Tab So Trump Can Host Super Bowl Party For His Club Members
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/trump-super-bowl-214856290.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_tr
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